“So very many silences, and kinds of silence: chapels and churches and confessionals, glades and gorges, pregnant pauses and searing lovemaking; the stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world; the silence of space, the vast of vista; the crucial silences between notes, without which there could be no music;”― Brian Doyle, The Plover
“Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another—why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.”― Mary Oliver, Devotions: A Read with Jenna Pick: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Slow to pause.
Hard stops woven throughout.
To put it all down for a spell.
To not do, multitask, grind.
Space to reflect.
Whitespace to create.
Recalibrate, reconsider, refresh.
Crucial silences to compose.
To be made new.
“As long as you live, you will be subject to change, whether you will it or not – now glad, now sorrowful; now pleased, now displeased; now devout, now undevout; now vigorous, now slothful; now gloomy, now merry. But a wise man who is well taught in spiritual labor stands unshaken in all such things, and heeds little what he feels, or from what side the wind of instability blows.”― Thomas à Kempis